PLEASE GOD, DON'T EVER LET THE SWEATSHIRT TREND DIE

After years of unscientific research conducted via my laptop, I’ve determined that a trend typically has a lifespan of two to three years before it quietly starts to fade into oblivion (colored tights and ponchos come to mind).

Or, the look will stay wildly popular until it eventually becomes a staple (think leggings and moto boots). At their fall 2011 runway show, Givenchy sent models down the runway in luxe sweatshirts, effectively kicking off the craze. Fast-forward to 2014 and I am holding onto this look for dear life.

Sweatshirts are easily one of the best trends, if not THE best, to come around in a long time. Seriously, I want to kiss Riccardo Tisci, the genius behind the Givenchy label, for making this happen. I mean passionately, with tongue. I’ve been wearing the hell out of my ever-growing collection of sweatshirts because I just find them to be so easy and versatile that I don’t even have to think about it. And that is the exactly kind of fashion I buy in bulk.

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I feel like Rihanna is the queen of fashion sweatshirts, and I’m always checking to see all the cute ways she wears them. She switches back and forth between tomboyish and sexy looks so effortlessly. I love that about RiRi. It always seems like she picked out her own clothes; not like a stylist figured everything out for her. Call me a cynic, but I just don’t believe that most celebs have a strong sense of personal style. She’s one of the few.

You know who else is a master sweatshirt wearer? That goddess Jenna Lyons. I still can’t shut up about how much she killed it with her outfit at the "Girls" premiere last month. Now that’s how it’s done, people.

But guys, I feel like we’re at the make or break point with this trend. Clearly, I’m nowhere near sick of it. And it’s definitely still a big look for spring. Beyond that, I’m not so sure. Who do I have to lobby to keep this thing going for a few more seasons? Or better yet, the rest of the decade? I’m willing to lead this crusade if it means I get to keep wearing sweatshirts to work twice a week. In the meantime, I’ve got my eye on five new ones. You like?

1. Olivaceaous Sweatshirt - Faux Leather Front, $58: The model is wearing this black sweatshirt very casually, but I think it would look great at night with dramatic earrings, black skinny jeans and pumps.

2. Acne Beta Sweatshirt, $193: Bright colors help me combat winter depression. And it’s long enough to wear with leggings (I don’t feel comfortable unless my entire butt is covered).

3. Daisy Street Oversized Varsity Sweatshirt, $28.21: I’m picturing this with a pleated schoolgirl skirt and some sort of sporty-cute sneaker.

4. Rodarte Barbed Wire Sweatshirt, $168: Doesn’t this look incredibly comfy? Also, logos are making a comeback, and I like that Rodarte’s is subtle. 5. Marc Jacobs Sequined Cashmere-Blend Sweatshirt, $1500: Speaking of logos, get a load of this chic shout-out to Coca-Cola. Will the price seem more justifiable if I tell you that the sweatshirt is made with embroidered sequins and cashmere? No? OK, well I love it anyway and since it costs as much as a timeless designer handbag, I would treat it like one and pass it down to my future daughter or niece or something. You know, like a family heirloom. Yep, that's how I'm gonna rationalize this.

www.queenieaustralia.com/orange-formal-dresses

Google Calls For Vote as Three Nigerians make finalists list in ‘Africa Connected’ Competition

Foremost search engine, Google, on Friday announced that three Nigerians had made it to the top 10 finalists in its “Africa Connected” competition.

In a statement on Friday, Google said the top 10 finalists also include two Kenyans, a Senegalese, a South African, a Zimbabwean and a Ghanaian.

However, the three Nigerian finalists were Eric Obuh, a social crusader; Eseoghene Odiete, a fashion designer, and Mayowa Adegbile, a philanthropist.

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Five successful winners from among the finalists would now be selected by the online voting public.

According to Google, the winners would go home with $25,000 (N4,065,000) each and would also have the opportunity to work with a Google sponsor over a six-month period, to further their online businesses.

It added that anyone who would like to vote for the five winners, in whose lives the web and Google have played a pivotal role, could do so on the Africa Connected website.

The statement said the competition was launched in August last year, calling entrepreneurs, creative innovators and web-lovers to share stories of how the web has transformed their lives and work.

The top 10 finalists were selected by a panel of judges from over 2,200 entries from 35 countries.

It said that the competition categories included: Education, Entertainment/Arts/Sports, Technology, Community, NGOs and Small businesses.

Affiong Osuchukwu, Google Lead for the Africa Connected initiative said, “Today, we are excited to announce the top 10 finalists who have been selected by our panel of judges.

“The diversity of their ventures – from providing clean drinking water to preserving culture – shows how the web can truly drive positive change in the lives of many people and their communities.

“We look forward to seeing who the voting public choose as the winners – the top five most inspiring success stories from across our continent.”

Google said the winners would be announced on April 1, at an event in Nairobi, Kenya.

www.queenieaustralia.com/bridesmaid-dresses

The Wedding Dress By Nelson Rodrigues Translated by Joffre Rodrigues with Toby Coe Directed by Rebecca Holderness

It’s tough to appreciate from the remove of 70 years and a translation from the Portuguese what about Nelson Rodrigues’ multilayered The Wedding Dress was so controversial in its time. Appearing first in 1943, the piece is credited with freeing Brazilian theater from the constraints of naturalism and introducing nonlinear storytelling, shifting perspectives, an acknowledgment of the existence of sex, and the visual vocabulary of expressionist filmmaking to the playmaker’s toolbox in that country. Rodrigues earned the attention of Brazil’s censors for his trouble.

www.queenieaustralia.com/red-carpet-celebrity-dresses

His seminal mystery/romance/psychodrama is more than a little forbidding. A young woman, Alaide, is struck by a car. While surgeons try to save her life, she stretches out on the astral plane, making contact with Madame Clessi, a courtesan who was murdered by a jealous adolescent lover decades earlier. The two of them explore Alaide’s possibly violent, possibly criminal romantic history/fantasy life, leaving the audience to sort the memories from the hallucinations.

Rebecca Holderness’s production for the surrealism-loving Spooky Action Theater is a jumble, but it’s a stylish, visually arresting jumble with a trio of compelling performances at its center. To what extent Mundy Spears’ Alaide is a femme fatale in her waking life is unclear, but in the realm of her fantasies, she vamps it up to 11, and it’s fun to watch Spears channel Jessica Rabbit. She has a volatile chemistry with Michael Kevin Darnall, who appears alternately as Alaide’s fiancée, her husband, and her lover. Darnall has an unstable quality that suggests a dangerous guy successfully impersonating a civilized, well-mannered one. As Madame Clessi, Dane Figueroa Edidi makes for an appropriately impish spirit-guide.

Vicki R. Davis’ set looks like a gallery installation, situating a horizontal lattice of steel pipes in the center of a white-walled, white-floored void. There’s a box camera and a floor-standing globe and a steamer trunk. Black-and-white projections, sometimes displayed on a scrim and sometimes on the walls of the stage, reinforce the notion that dream logic is the only logic that matters in this realm. Erik Teague’s costumes seem to hail from different eras—pinstriped suits and fedoras for the men, frilly dancehall-style dresses and stockings for the women—and they are, like the rest of the visual palette, immaculate. Like a Borges short story or a Buñuel film, The Wedding Dress is better appreciated as a rich sensual experience than as a semi-opaque narrative one.

www.queenieaustralia.com/bridesmaid-dresses

The Wedding Dress By Nelson Rodrigues Translated by Joffre Rodrigues with Toby Coe Directed by Rebecca Holderness

It’s tough to appreciate from the remove of 70 years and a translation from the Portuguese what about Nelson Rodrigues’ multilayered The Wedding Dress was so controversial in its time. Appearing first in 1943, the piece is credited with freeing Brazilian theater from the constraints of naturalism and introducing nonlinear storytelling, shifting perspectives, an acknowledgment of the existence of sex, and the visual vocabulary of expressionist filmmaking to the playmaker’s toolbox in that country. Rodrigues earned the attention of Brazil’s censors for his trouble.

www.queenieaustralia.com/red-carpet-celebrity-dresses

His seminal mystery/romance/psychodrama is more than a little forbidding. A young woman, Alaide, is struck by a car. While surgeons try to save her life, she stretches out on the astral plane, making contact with Madame Clessi, a courtesan who was murdered by a jealous adolescent lover decades earlier. The two of them explore Alaide’s possibly violent, possibly criminal romantic history/fantasy life, leaving the audience to sort the memories from the hallucinations.

Rebecca Holderness’s production for the surrealism-loving Spooky Action Theater is a jumble, but it’s a stylish, visually arresting jumble with a trio of compelling performances at its center. To what extent Mundy Spears’ Alaide is a femme fatale in her waking life is unclear, but in the realm of her fantasies, she vamps it up to 11, and it’s fun to watch Spears channel Jessica Rabbit. She has a volatile chemistry with Michael Kevin Darnall, who appears alternately as Alaide’s fiancée, her husband, and her lover. Darnall has an unstable quality that suggests a dangerous guy successfully impersonating a civilized, well-mannered one. As Madame Clessi, Dane Figueroa Edidi makes for an appropriately impish spirit-guide.

Vicki R. Davis’ set looks like a gallery installation, situating a horizontal lattice of steel pipes in the center of a white-walled, white-floored void. There’s a box camera and a floor-standing globe and a steamer trunk. Black-and-white projections, sometimes displayed on a scrim and sometimes on the walls of the stage, reinforce the notion that dream logic is the only logic that matters in this realm. Erik Teague’s costumes seem to hail from different eras—pinstriped suits and fedoras for the men, frilly dancehall-style dresses and stockings for the women—and they are, like the rest of the visual palette, immaculate. Like a Borges short story or a Buñuel film, The Wedding Dress is better appreciated as a rich sensual experience than as a semi-opaque narrative one.

www.queenieaustralia.com/bridesmaid-dresses

The Wedding Dress By Nelson Rodrigues Translated by Joffre Rodrigues with Toby Coe Directed by Rebecca Holderness

It’s tough to appreciate from the remove of 70 years and a translation from the Portuguese what about Nelson Rodrigues’ multilayered The Wedding Dress was so controversial in its time. Appearing first in 1943, the piece is credited with freeing Brazilian theater from the constraints of naturalism and introducing nonlinear storytelling, shifting perspectives, an acknowledgment of the existence of sex, and the visual vocabulary of expressionist filmmaking to the playmaker’s toolbox in that country. Rodrigues earned the attention of Brazil’s censors for his trouble.

www.queenieaustralia.com/red-carpet-celebrity-dresses

His seminal mystery/romance/psychodrama is more than a little forbidding. A young woman, Alaide, is struck by a car. While surgeons try to save her life, she stretches out on the astral plane, making contact with Madame Clessi, a courtesan who was murdered by a jealous adolescent lover decades earlier. The two of them explore Alaide’s possibly violent, possibly criminal romantic history/fantasy life, leaving the audience to sort the memories from the hallucinations.

Rebecca Holderness’s production for the surrealism-loving Spooky Action Theater is a jumble, but it’s a stylish, visually arresting jumble with a trio of compelling performances at its center. To what extent Mundy Spears’ Alaide is a femme fatale in her waking life is unclear, but in the realm of her fantasies, she vamps it up to 11, and it’s fun to watch Spears channel Jessica Rabbit. She has a volatile chemistry with Michael Kevin Darnall, who appears alternately as Alaide’s fiancée, her husband, and her lover. Darnall has an unstable quality that suggests a dangerous guy successfully impersonating a civilized, well-mannered one. As Madame Clessi, Dane Figueroa Edidi makes for an appropriately impish spirit-guide.

Vicki R. Davis’ set looks like a gallery installation, situating a horizontal lattice of steel pipes in the center of a white-walled, white-floored void. There’s a box camera and a floor-standing globe and a steamer trunk. Black-and-white projections, sometimes displayed on a scrim and sometimes on the walls of the stage, reinforce the notion that dream logic is the only logic that matters in this realm. Erik Teague’s costumes seem to hail from different eras—pinstriped suits and fedoras for the men, frilly dancehall-style dresses and stockings for the women—and they are, like the rest of the visual palette, immaculate. Like a Borges short story or a Buñuel film, The Wedding Dress is better appreciated as a rich sensual experience than as a semi-opaque narrative one.

www.queenieaustralia.com/bridesmaid-dresses

A look at Fashion Blogging through Re:Fashion

At ArcticStartup we like to cover scalable growth startups - the type of online companies that build one product and sell it hundreds of times over. In our experience, online media is not the most scalable product in the world. It takes huge resources ever day to pump out new content to keep 'customers' sold on your product.

That being said, Helsinki-based Re:fashion is a story about online entrepreneurship, and today the fashion blogging portal is grabbing huge pageviews in their demographic of 20-35 year old women, and is already counting some huge brands like Nokia Lumia, Olympus cameras, Onepiece, and others as customers. Today with their eight bloggers they count 60,000 uniques per week after launching in September of 2013.

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"It started with a joke," says Iina Moukola, co-founder and Editor in Chief of Re:fashion. "I was complaining that I had no power to decide cooperations or banners I could use on my blog [at my old blog portal]." At the time Moukola was consulting with Teppo Hudson and Rainer Gesellle, who were building The Fashion Mags, a tool for fashion bloggers to design more magazine-looking 'spreads' for their blogs, while also helping them plug into monetization features. Their response was that she should just start her own thing then.

So with their help, they built up a new portal and convinces seven other bloggers to come onboard.

To monetize, the portal uses a little affiliate marketing, but prefer to use 'co-creations' as their main tool. Here the bloggers interact with and personally tell their audience about product or events. "The reader feels like the blogger is your friend, and they tell you about something," says Moukola. The result is a deeper connection between readers and the advertisements, and hopefully more sincere and rewarding for all the parties involved.

Additionally to activate their readers, Re:fashion bloggers encourage their readers to share pics on instagram and reach out to their readers at store-sponsored events, where one of the bloggers will go to a large department store for an event, meet their readers in person, and talk about their favorite type of lipstick at the store, for example.

These monetization models are industry practice for fashion bloggers, but absent are banner adds, which they find ugly and unrewarding for readers. The closest thing they'll do is rebrand the top Re:fashion logo individually for brands, which provides a more seamless reader experience, as shown below.

There are some downsides to throwing away banners - the sales process for designing these custom campaigns takes a lot more brainpower and time than throwing up a banner from Tradedoubler, or another banner bidding platform.

Senni Niemi, Sales manager at Re:Fashion tells us that it gets easier to sales as the blog gets more established . Additionally she says even though they have a smaller blogger platform than some larger competitors, like Trendi, the Finnish fashion magazine that runs a blog portal, or Indiedays, but they're strongly focused in the 20-35 year-old demographic, which is more ideal to advertisers than 15 year-olds with relatively no money.

For growth the company is planning on staying relatively small. They're somewhat interested in getting more bloggers onboard, but they say it's important to for new bloggers to fit into their demographic, and they want to grow by quality, not by grabbing anyone new onboard.

We at ArcticStartup share the same office as Re:fashion, and while I give them a hard time about taking pictures of their newly painted fingernails, I'm amazed at the amount of traffic they drive by talking about their trip to the spa, or how they've arranged flowers in their apartment. There's huge consumer appeal to what they're doing, and as trendsetters they have a stronger impact on consumers than I think the average 23 year-old male entrepreneur understands. We've covered startups like Helsinki-based Publishzer's The Fasion Mags and Sweden'sBlogLovin, but I think there's a lot more innovation that can be plugged into these portals for gain.

The moral of the story is that online media is a lot of work, and Re:fashion isn't taking the easy way out with their monetization scheme, but Moukola says it's been rewarding building a platform by bloggers for bloggers. With their ideals, you have to wish them luck.

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Is Sydney more fashionable than Melbourne?

It's official. Sydney beats Melbourne as the most fashionable city in Australia. According to a Global Language Monitor survey, Sydney sits comfortably at number 8 in the global fashion capital rankings, 18 places ahead of Melbourne who stumble in at 26. And the gap is widening. Just one year earlier Sydney was at number 15 with Melbourne at number 21.

Yes, that's right Sydneysiders. you can now speak with impunity when you say Sydney streaks ahead in the age-old war pitting the two cities against each other. And if it's begrudgingly admitted that Melbourne dominates the sports side with the Australian Open and the Grand Prix, it appears, just six weeks out from the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival, that Sydney owns style – a category Melburnians thought they'd always win.

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Jo Barry, director of social media company The Word Collective, who has lived in both cities and worked at a fashion magazine when she was based in Sydney, has this to say: “As someone who's inhabited both places, I disagree. Sydneysiders exude sexiness, while Melbourne women dress with a more intellectual and thought-through look – it's all about unexpected cuts and perfect layering with an intelligent mix of textures, proportions and fabrics. There's a reason why Topshop, Muji, Uniqlo, Acne and A.P.C chose Melbourne for their first Australian outposts."

But Sydney's who's who of fashion say they've known all along that Sydney is where it's at, with Fashion Week originating in Sydney and the majority of designers basing themselves in Sydney.

“The business is here and the buyers come here,” says Georgie Renkert, fashion designer of label, We Are Kindred. “There's a certain amount of glamour attached to dressing in Sydney. You can always frock up and never look out of place in an LBD, or a floral or a lace.”

The methodology of the research can't be blamed either, which, according to the Global Language Monitor website, “is based on GLM's narrative tracking technology. Narrative Tracker analyses the internet, blogosphere, the top 250,000 print and electronic news media, as well as new social media sources [such as Twitter] as they emerge.” Sounds rather thorough.

Sydney style is often referred to as “beach culture” while Melbourne has always been “more European”. In fact, a quick Facebook shout-out to my friend network elicited this comment: “If you consider torn jean shorts, same-same balayage and orange fake tanned legs fashionable, Sydney wins.”

But it seems while Melbourne turned its well-styled back, Sydney has quietly become the more sophisticated sister, ditching its beachy roots in favour of high fashion allure. Elegance and savvy chic are the order of the day with less focus on summer style and more focus on dressing for the occasion.

“I would say there are a few major players in the blogging community that had a bearing on this rank too,” says Beth MacGraw, designer of the label macgraw. “Sydney is the home of Mercedes-Benz Australian Fashion Week, our international platform for local designers, but I love the Melbourne aesthetic and think the Australian industry as a whole is stamping its relevance on the international fashion community.”

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Barneys’ Creative Ambassador Simon Doonan On Fashion and Show Business

“I never understood why anybody would want to be an artist when they could be a window dresser,” says Simon Doonan, the man who’s been a window dresser — and a lot more — for some 30 years now. “If you’re an artist, you’re stuck in some gallery somewhere. When you’re a window dresser, you’re on the street. It’s democratic. Everyone gets to see what you do. Dogs, children, homeless people.” Then, with wryly British self-deprecation: “I’m ultimately more of a carnie.”

He doesn’t do the windows anymore at Barneys — not since he shifted to the role of the upscale department store’s creative ambassador, after 20 years as its creative director — but with six books under his belt (including “The Asylum,” released in September), a bimonthly column on Slate, a U.K. TV series based on his memoirs (“Beautiful People”) and a flair for colorful shirts, he remains the brand’s most eye-catching figure.

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The worlds of fashion, retail and show business bump into each other all the time. And does Doonan have some showbiz tales to tell you, happily dishing over croissants and muffins at Genes, the eighth-floor cafe of Barneys’ East Side flagship.

Did you know, for instance, that as a punky young man just starting out in London retail, Doonan got one of his first gigs working for Shirley Russell, wife of writer-director Ken Russell, in her shop the Last Picture Frock? There she rented and sold off costumes from her husband’s movies including “The Boy Friend,” “Lisztomania,” “The Devils” and “Women in Love.”

That was after the native of Reading, England, went to college in Manchester, and before the move to London where the incipient punk movement prodded him to create the “radical, loony, crazy, edgy” window designs — think holiday displays with rats in little tuxedos — that soon turned the head of the founder of L.A. store Maxfield, Tommy Perse, who lured Doonan out to Los Angeles in 1978.

Back then Maxfield was on Santa Monica Boulevard next to the Troubadour club, and the likes of Natalie Wood, Cher, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Brown, Linda Ronstadt, Chaka Khan and the members of Fleetwood Mac used to shop there.

“It was names, names, names in this tiny hokey little store,” Doonan remembers. “Back then it was not like now, where everyone’s groovy in L.A. What’s happened to L.A. is similar to what’s happened to fashion. It’s gone from being this smaller world to this huge landscape, and you have to just surrender to it.”

He worked at Maxfield for eight years. His favorite story? Being approached by a director he’d never heard of named Martin Brest to design the department store displays that would be featured in his upcoming film. He agreed, except the tribulations of development suddenly turned the movie into a comedy with a new star, and they needed an art gallery, not a department store. Doonan cheerfully volunteered that he could do galleries, too.

“I worked on that movie for a year, and then they said to me, ‘OK, do you want points or do you want a check?’ ” he recalls. “I thought, ‘What are these points? They’re trying to stiff me!’ So I said no, just give me a check, and I got this very nominal amount of money. I remember going to the wrap party and thinking, ‘This’ll be the last we hear of these shenanigans.’ ”

The movie turned out to be “Beverly Hills Cop.” But he laughs off the missed revenue, talking about how he also designed sets for a handful of L.A. plays alongside costume designer Michael Kaplan (“Fight Club,” “Seven,” the new “Star Trek” films). In 1986 he moved East to start his tenure at Barneys.

There he began as a window dresser and eventually rose to creative director in a 20-year stint that ended in early 2011. It was in writing the intro for a photo book of his window displays that he discovered that people wanted to read more of his writing.

For years he had a column at the New York Observer, prior to his current output at Slate. “Windows was a great preparation for writing a column,” he says. “It’s very ephemeral. That’s one of things I liked about windows: It’s very forgiving. It kept changing and changing every week. You can’t be too precious about it. I took the same approach as I did to windows — irreverence, being unconventional, being idiosyncratic — and I applied it to writing.”

He started writing books, too, beginning with “Confessions of a Window Dresser” in 2001.

“We live in an age where women have become so self-conscious and so self-critical that the feminist in me gets very uncomfortable with it,” he declares. “My mission with my writing is always to get women to be less self-critical, and to be sort of like the girls that I used to know in the ’70s in London, who never worried about what other people thought about them. They were very free.”

It’s the kind of customer who would shop at the store with which he’s so closely associated, a smart woman who appreciates the retailer’s “connoisseurial” approach to fashion.

“People say to me, ‘What should I wear to this brunch?’ and I say, ‘Well, why don’t you wear a ball gown? Fuck it. Upstage everybody.’ ” He flashes a mischievous grin. “That’s why probably I give very bad advice, because it’s always so anarchic.”

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Night of the no-name designers

It wasn’t Givenchy, Elie Saab or Versace who made news on Grammys red carpet on January 26.

It was Michael Costello, Nicholas Jebran, Johanna Johnson and Haus of Milani.

Never heard of them? I must confess, I hadn’t either. And that’s a good thing.

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For once, it didn’t seem as though everyone on the red carpet was dressed by the highest bidder—angling for, or fulfilling the obligations of, six-figure endorsement deals with luxury companies.

They went their own way, which may be the new way in fashion.

The big talk this awards show season has been about how the ultimate status symbol is to have a one-of-a-kind couture gown made by one of fashion’s biggest names. But what about a gown by a name no one knows yet? It seems that may be an even bigger status symbol, and a true sign of individuality.

And as viewers, it certainly left us guessing, and sometimes scratching our heads, just like awards shows did in years gone by, when you never knew what stars were going to show up wearing. (An Indian headdress? Sheer beaded pajamas? A swan dress?)

Beyoncé chose a dramatic sheer white lace gown by Los Angeles-based Michael Costello, a Project Runway alum who shows his collection in New York but is not widely known or stocked in big stores.

John Legend’s wife, model Chrissy Teigen, wore a glorious golden gown by Johanna Johnson, who is based in Sydney, Australia, and started with bridal (which is still her core business) before developing her evening-wear line.

Paula Patton’s whimsical animal-themed dress was by Nicholas Jebran, a Lebanese designer who launched his collection in 2010. And Paris Hilton’s white gown with sheer panels showing off every asset was created by Los Angeles-based Haus of Milan designer Xtina Milani.

Of course, the Grammys is an awards show where costume dressing is encouraged, and we expect a certain level of individuality, creativity and daring from performers walking the red carpet. So this is a trend that may be limited to the music biz.

But let’s hope not. Even if all the dresses weren’t slam dunks, I for one was happy to see some new names in the mix.

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